Disco Before Disco Dancing and popular music in the 1960s and 1970s in England

Dancing has been a central component of the experience of popular music, yet with the exceptions of disco and electronic dance music, it is rarely discussed in the academic literature. This article focuses on a pivotal moment in the transformation of dancing to popular music in England. The second half of the 1960s saw the gradual move from dancing to live groups to dancing to records in clubs. Just before this dancing itself had changed from something done by couples to something done by individuals albeit usually in pairs, though often girls might dance together in a group. Young people in England learned to dance to music with a strongly emphasized beat. This article traces this genre from its early manifestations in tracks by the Honeycombs and the Dave Clark Five in the first half of the 1960s to the early 1970s in tracks by Mud and Slade. The article ends by looking at how this musical genre morphed into Eurodisco in the production work of Giorgio Moroder.